January 9, 2014

Testing the Sony a7r

A Sony representative was kind enough to lend me a 36Mp a7r mirrorless camera. With only 24 hours to run it through its paces, I strapped on my Contax Zeiss 35mm f/1.4 and 50mm f/1.4 lenses and took the streets of Seattle for some late night urban landscape testing. Feast your eyes on this: (right click/”open link in new window” to zoom in)

This is a very quick and dirty stitched pano made from 85 captures. I used my Really Right Stuff panorama rig to shoot 5 rows of 17 images in a 255 degree arc. All the captures were made using the camera’s Auto HDR function and saved to jpg in camera. The jpgs were then stitched in PTGui Pro for mac. What you see here is significantly cropped and dramatically downsized. The original uncropped file contains a truly astonishing amount of detail. Below are some highly compressed 100% crops. These are incredibly small sections from the larger image above.

While it’s true that good panorama stitching technique allows virtually any camera to create impressively detailed images, the quality of the individual pixels does make a difference when zooming in on those details. The high res file of the above image has enough resolution to print an exquisitely detailed 8 foot by 20 foot print! Standing in front of a print like that is like being there.

This camera is definitely going to be joining my collection of photo power tools. Stay tuned… I will be testing this camera in a variety of studio and location scenarios for both stills and video. I’ll be updating this page with additional thoughts on this spectacular new Sony a7r.